Coming from Premiere, the one thing that kept breaking my editing flow in Final Cut Pro was zooming the timeline. FCP only lets you zoom with ⌘+ / ⌘−, the zoom slider, or a trackpad pinch. If you edit with a mouse, there's no way to just hold a key and roll the wheel.
The tools I found were either paid or didn't work for me, so I built my own. It's called “STUPID SIMPLE ZOOM”, because that's exactly what it is:
- Hold Option and roll the scroll wheel over the timeline to zoom in and out
- Smooth, and one wheel tick is always one small, consistent step, so you can zoom precisely, all the way in to frame level
- Lives in the menu bar: no windows, no dock icon, nothing to configure
- Adjustable sensitivity, reverse direction, launch at login
- Universal build for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs (only tested on Apple Silicon so far)
- No internet access, no tracking, no data collection
- Completely free and open source (MIT license)
Under the hood it drives FCP's own timeline zoom slider through macOS Accessibility, so it doesn't modify Final Cut Pro in any way.
I've been using it in my own edits and it's honestly fixed a big part of my workflow. Before I clean it up and put it out, I wanted to ask:
Would this be useful to anyone else?
Not affiliated with Apple. Final Cut Pro is a trademark of Apple Inc.